By John Pickard
Labour Party officials have expelled a respected councillor and long-standing Labour member in Carlisle for innocuous Facebook comments. After a life-time supporting Labour, Alan McGuckin has been unceremoniously dumped out the Party on the most spurious grounds
A report in the Cumberland News and Star goes into some detail about the expulsion. “Alan McGuckin”, the report explains, “became a trade union member at 16 and a shop steward a year later. He joined the Labour Party two years later in 1973 before going on to forge a successful career as a full-time official with the T&GWU union”.
Alan has also been a Labour councillor twice, firstly in his native North-East and later in Carlisle, after becoming a trade union official in that area. Alan has represented Carlisle’s Castle ward on Cumbria County Council since 2014. He is also the former chair of the Cumbria Forum of Trades Unions, until he retired in 2015.
Alan, who was a member of Penrith and the Border CLP for nearly thirty years, and is described by the News and Star as a “political veteran”, has now been forced to sit as an “independent socialist” on the county council.
He was always an outspoken supporter of the former leader Jeremy Corbyn and has been a thorn in the side of Labour’s right wing for that reason. To give an idea how ludicrous the campaign against Alan has been, he has said that party officials at first told him he was being investigated for a letter he wrote for the old Militant newspaper in 1978, nearly forty-five years ago!
“It appears to be a crime to stand on the left”.
Later, he was told that his expulsion was because of comments on Facebook posted in 2019 and 2020 on the FB page of the Left Labour Alliance – this was even before the proscription of the LLA. It made no difference that Alan pointed out that his comments were “inoffensive opinions” about the LLA.
Speaking to the News and Star about his feelings, on being expelled from a Party he has worked for his whole life Alan said: “It’s disgraceful…
“But it’s not surprising, given the regime that Keir Starmer has introduced into the Labour Party. It appears to be a crime to stand on the left, defending the socialist values of the party. I want Labour to be a broad church but I’d like it to prefer socialist values.
“I don’t think we can afford to have people in the party who don’t want to transform society.” In his 50 years in the party, he said, he had never seen such a “one-sided civil war being waged on those on the left of the party”.
Alan correctly described his expulsion as a “bureaucratic, heavy-handed witch-hunt,” but added, “There’ll always be socialists in the Labour Party, not matter what the right wing tries to do about it.”
The Labour party tops, he added, are trying to “purge the party of those who oppose capitalism,” adding that he still retained “a lot of sympathy from other members.”
One Labour member supporting Alan is Karen Lockney, another Labour county councillor. Karen is also the Education Officer for the Penrith and the Border CLP and works for the TUC in the Northern Region. “I’m very sad”, she told the News and Star, “that somebody who has given a lifetime of service to the Labour Party has had his membership terminated in such a sudden way, without a great deal of explanation.” Alan clearly retains the support of many members still in the Labour Party. The Labour bureaucracy cannot expel them all. This story is not over and we will carry further reports in Left Horizons in due course.
[Top photo: Cumberland News and Star]
